As early as 1915, Britain, France, and Russia issued a statement that the Armenians were the victims of crimes against humanity and civilization (the term "genocide" didn't exist then).[3] The Treaty of Sèvres, signed in 1920, created an Armenian state. However, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the first president of the Great National Assembly, refused to abide by the treaty. An Armenian Republic had been founded, and new borders (which changed in Turkey's favor) were drawn between Armenia and Turkey by the Treaty of Kars,[4] signed with Armenians and Soviet Russia. This Armenian Republic, much smaller than that which was intended in Sèvres, was then subsumed into the Soviet Union by the Treaty of Moscow.[5]

Many more deportations of Armenians took place in the process.[6] Turkey escaped being held responsible by the international community.

Recognition of the Armenian Genocide is a thorny issue, since Turkey occupies a very strategic position in the world. Currently, 43 nations provide some level of recognition of the event. Historically, Turkey has leveraged its position as an important ally in the Middle East to keep the United States from recognizing the genocide, but the United States recently joined the group of nations that recognize what the Ottomans did. Another holdout is Israel, which has only tepidly recognized the genocide. This is largely because the Israelis are in-between a rock and a hard place: Turkey is one of the few predominantly Muslim nations in their region which maintains some level of diplomatic ties with them.

The Turkish government, as well as its nationalist supporters, is probably the most outspoken objector to the term "genocide." In fact, a Turk, in Turkey, can even be arrested for acknowledging that one took place (a strange inversion of laws that criminalize Holocaust denial). This falls under Article 301 of the Turkish penal code, which makes it a crime to "insult Turkishness" (regardless of whether it's true).[7] Prosecutors brought such a case in 2005 against writer Orhan Pamuk, who later won the Nobel Prize in Literature.[8]

There are other Turks outside the Armenian community who recognize the Armenian Genocide. This includes scholars like Fatma Muge Cocek (a.k.a. Fatma Müge Göçek),[9] and Taner Akçam.[10][11] This has not gone over well with much of the Turkish public, especially nationalists.

The CUP (Committee of Union and Progress) was a Turkish political faction that basically controlled the nation's politics during and slightly before the First World War.[12] During and slightly after that war, it engaged in genocide against Turkey's religious minorities, mostly Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks.[13] It was a branch of the Young Turks (no, not those).[14] Since then, the Turkish governments and especially Turkish nationalists have adopted a denialist stance on the issue, using deceit and tricks in order to attempt to obscure and justify the atrocities, including numerous red herrings, in order to deceive the public.

"Armenians/Greeks were rebelling and killing Turks/Turks also died"[edit]

Corpses of Armenian children slaughtered by the Ottomans during the 1895 Hamidian massacres.

Turkish nationalists often claim that Armenians were rebelling against the Ottoman state and collaborating with the Russian army in order to justify their slaughter, with hilarious anecdotes that include Armenians boiling pregnant Muslim women in vats of jam.[15][16][17] This is usually followed with a ton of blaming the victim and making themselves out to be the victims of the violence. However, such a stand is historically problematic for a number of reasons.

An Armenian slave woman in Turkey after the genocide carrying thistles for fuel.

Turks and Kurds had already been slaughtering Armenians for decades in an attempt to eliminate them. In 1895, Turkish leader Sultan Abdulhamid II, confronted with the horrifying spectacle of Armenians defending themselves against Muslim depredations, ordered his troops to "give them a box on the ear" launching pogroms that killed hundreds of thousands.[18]

In fact, Turkish oppression of Christians went back hundreds of years, with one major burst of slaughter that could easily be characterized as genocide in 1019.[19] The Ottoman devshirme Janissary gathering system also counts as genocide.[note 2]

All Armenian rebellion and resistance was completely justified as an act of self-defense. All Armenian resistance was preceded by massacres of Armenian civilians. If they had not resisted, they would have died.[20] As it was, mass rapes and forced conversions (about 200,000) still occurred. Armenian slaughter of Turks was non-systematic and there was no organized plan to slaughter the Turkish population of Anatolia. Turkish and especially Kurdish women participated in the atrocities and where therefore legitimate targets of Armenian retaliation.[21][22] Muslim children, meanwhile, would grow up to become the same butchers their parents were. Since the Turks were hell-bent on exterminating the Armenians and establishing a homogenously Muslim Anatolia, the only way to get them to see reason was to hit them where it hurt, namely by slaughtering their loved ones. Such actions had the added advantage of damaging the CUP's demographic plans. Turkish children also served as child soldiers and provided vital war labor services to the Ottoman state.[23]

Further Turkish propaganda aims to portray Armenians as collaborating with the Tsar in order to justify their slaughter.[24] However, as noted above, to the degree this actually happened, it was perfectly excusable as self-defense. In fact, despite the horrors they had been subjected to, Ottoman Armenians in 1914 generally were loyal to and fought for the Ottoman Army.[25] Most Armenians fighting in the Russian army before the Tehcir decree were Eastern (that is, living in areas the Russians already controlled) Armenians, and the first victims of the genocide were ethnic Armenian soldiers in the Ottoman army, who were about the most loyal people possible. Until they realized they were being subjected to wholesale massacre, Armenians generally even complied with Turkish deportation orders.[26] 550,000 Greeks were killed by the Turks before the war even started, during a period where the Greek government was pro-German (and hence friendly to the Ottomans.)[27][28] Thus, it is clear that the genocide was not for legitimate wartime reasons, or caused by fear of Armenian collaboration, but rather the product of bigotry against religious minorities.

Furthermore, it is usually conveniently forgotten by Turkish apologists that a significant portion (in fact, probably a majority) of Muslim deaths in Anatolia during the First World War were caused by seizures of property and food by the Ottoman government, which even forced Muslim poor and peasants to be worked to death in forced labor gangs (along, of course, with Christians).[29] Similarly, the massive quantities of dead bodies from victims of genocide lead to considerable Muslim deaths from disease due to all the rotting flesh.[30] The amnesia over these events, with the corresponding shift of blame onto "Armenian gangs", is therefore a convenient method of hiding embarrassing and unappetizing history. Additionally, Turkish historians have taken to exhuming the mass graves of dead Armenians slaughtered in the genocide and portraying these as corpses of Muslims in order to pretend the perpetrators of the genocide were in fact its victims.[27]

"There was no intent to exterminate Christians/It was just deportation"[edit]

Excavation of Armenian remains at the former Deir-ez-Zor concentration camp in 1938. Armenian intellectual Harutyun Hovakimian is holding the skull, local tavern owner Murat Gilichian is at left, the bell ringer of a local church (St. Hripsime) and an unidentified worker are in the background.

It is well documented that the deportation marches were specifically designed to slaughter minorities. Disease outbreaks among deportees went deliberately untreated.[30] Turkish gendarmes deliberately left Armenians in deserts without water. Pregnant women were forced to leave their young babies to die in those same deserts.Kurdstortured Armenian children to death. Entire families were slaughtered by rifle fire or killed by means of knives, axes, or daggers. Women and children were tied up to be thrown to their deaths from heights. Others were burned up in straw barns or drowned in the Euphrates. The Ottomans deliberately put turbans on the bodies of dead Armenians in order to portray them as Muslims, then hired Kurdish women to weep over the bodies. They then photographed the scene in order to portray the Armenians as aggressors and the Kurds as independently moving against the Armenians in revenge.[note 3] Armenians, especially women and children, were widely sold as slaves by their tormentors. Soldiers were ordered to slaughter Armenian civilians, and bounties were paid for their deaths. Property of the deceased was confiscated, and those who caused the deaths were generally allowed to keep a sizable portion. An Armenian woman from Ras al-Ain, where even today the Turk is directing his genocidal attentions, was tortured for money by one of the gendarmes, who then raped her daughter. In Diyarbakir, nearly every house had at least one Armenian slave-maid, with an estimated 5,000 in the city at the time of the genocide.[34]

Armenian corpses along the "deportation" route.

Nor was this the limit of the atrocities. The Turks and Kurds would forcibly undress young girls, make them bend over, rape them, then have them impaled through their vaginas with sharpened wooden stakes shaped like crosses.[35] Armenians were massacred around Van without regard for age or sex.[36] The Muslims would kill young girls after finishing raping them, slaughter young children by bashing their heads together, and cut off Armenian women's breasts.[37] One Turkish effendi provided an interesting perspective by pointing out that the Christians' God seemed to have no interest in saving them.[38] Ottoman gendarmes purposely threw bodies of dead Armenians into wells after killing them, in order to make the water undrinkable for others.[39]Special bands (the aforementioned butcher battalions) were commissioned to provide young girls for the harems of Constantinople.[40] Ottoman leader Talaat Pasha remarked that what was being done to the Armenians was "amusing".[41] Young Muslim boys of all ethnicities would throw stones and sticks at refugees, and, if they were near their own age, would kidnap and sexually assault them.[42] One prominent Malatian Muslim, Hadji Ghafour, ordered an Armenian slave girl stripped of her clothes and beaten to death with a whip by his black slave for refusing to convert to Islam.[43]Chechen auxiliaries in Ottoman pay enjoyed grabbing young girls, throwing them up in the air, and spearing them with their swords until they died, making a communal game out of the process, with dismounted Chechens providing the initial throws. Those who survived the first spearing were "reused" until they finally died. Jews, meanwhile, were forced by the Mohammedans to dispose of Armenians bodies, although they were not killed.[44]Djevdet Bey, the Ottoman governor of Van vilayet, referring to his job of killing Armenians, stated that he "had no job to do {but} so much fun". His statement became a slogan for Ottoman soldiers doing the same thing. Gendarmes would sell Armenian girls to the highest bidder as concubines and field laborers.[45] Babies born on the deportation marches were generally killed.[46] At Sheitan Deressi (Devil's Gorge), the Turks killed all the men and mutilated the women, sparing only those who could later be sold as slaves.[47]German soldiers also participated in massacres.[48] Armenian monks were forced to convert to Islam -or die, and their monasteries were looted and transformed into "government schools" to turn children into Turks.[49]

German soldiers posing with bones of dead Armenians killed in a massacre near Hekimhan on November 18, 1918.

There is similarly no lack of proof or intent. It was official Ottoman policy that "Armenians girls be married to Muslims" in order to decimate their communities and use their bodies to breed more Mahommetans.[50][51] Muslim physicians were allowed to use Armenian children for medicalexperiments.[52][note 4]Cemal Azmi Bey, the governor of Trebizond, ordered Armenians, especially women and children, to be rowed out to sea and drowned. He also ordered a local Red Crescent building to be turned into a "pleasure den", where he and his 14-year-old son raped young Armenian girls and drowned those they did not rape in the Black Sea, joking that "the anchovies will multiply due to the waters being choked with bodies". In fact, a more moderate sultan's government later sentenced him to death for his crimes, supported by numerous sworn accounts of his wrongdoing.[53] Unsurprisingly, however, modern Turkey has named a school after the guy, with a glowing biography glorifying the genocide and referring to him as a "martyr" on its website.[54]

The genocide was based on clear orders from above. Ottoman Interior Affairs Minister Talaat Pasha ordered Diyarbakir governor Reshid Bey to exterminate the Armenians within his jurisdiction in a telegram containing three words-"Burn-Destroy-Kill".[55][note 5] He gladly admitted that he was completely intolerant of any Armenians remaining in their ancestral homeland in eastern Anatolia, stating that they should be forced to die in the Syrian desert.[56][57] Since Talaat had planned to exterminate the Armenians since at least 1910, confiding his desire to the Danish ambassador, it can safely be said that the deportations were not a legitimate war measure. The CUP government had similarly been providing funding to units of Turkish irregulars, ordering them to slaughter the Greek population of Ionia around Smyrna since even before the war, killing about 100,000 in the area before the war even started.[58] Similarly, mass slaughters by Ottoman troops and pro-Ottoman irregulars of Armenian and Assyrian civilians occurred in Urmia, which was not even Ottoman (Urmia was, and still is, Persian territory).[59][60] In fact, the Assyrian genocide began there, in a country that attempted to be neutral during the war.[61][62] Note that very few deportations actually occurred it Urmia (it was basically just butchery.)

"Negligible numbers of Christians died/There were less than 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey in 1914"[edit]

Other common tactics by Turkish denialists are to claim that the numbers of dead Armenians was far lower than it actually was (usually put by the revisionist slime in the mere hundreds of thousands) or that 1.5 million Armenians couldn't have been killed, because there weren't 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey in 1914. The Turkish government itself, the denier-in-chief, puts the death toll at around 300,000.[63] This number, however, is based on the Ottoman census, which was known to be highly inaccurate, generally undercounting populations severely, especially those of ethnic and religious minorities. Populations of non-Muslims often were not re-counted for decades.[64] The Armenian church, which had the benefit of being able to collate all records of births and deaths within the Armenian community, gave a figure of 1,914,620 in 1914, although the church failed to assess populations in significant parts of western Turkey.[65]

It should also be noted that in 1844, the Ottoman Armenian population was given as 2.4 million, and a reliable historian at the time (Ubicini) said that number was almost certainly too low, by a significant amount.[66] In 1878, after the war, the same census gave the population as 3 million.[67] If we assume that 300,000 Armenians were killed in Hamidian massacres (the standard figure), and that the effects of emigration and loss of Armenian-populated Ottoman territories in the aftermath of the 1877-1878 war between the Ottoman and the Russians were balanced out or more than balanced by natural Armenian population growth (as all data, including the official Ottoman censuses, seems to suggest), we are left with a figure of at least 2.7-2.8 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1914 from the later data.

It should also be noted that considerable numbers of Armenians were killed in areas not under Ottoman control in 1914, such as Urmia (which was Persian), and in the oblasts of Kars and Batum and the Erivan Governorate (which contained the Armenian iconic site of Mount Ararat), which were Russian before the war.[68][69][70][71] Obviously, these regions would not have been included in the Ottoman census, and thus their inhabitants would not have been included in any estimate for the pre-genocide Ottoman Armenian population. This fact seems to be oddly missing from Turkish literature.

"Ottoman officials made sure deportees were well cared for and fed them"[edit]

The document cited is from the Turkish archives. It could have easily been written afterwards in an attempt to shield the Turks from justice and turn the evidence towards their position. There is no proof that it was "intended for internal consumption" as Dadrian (allegedly) said.

Acts by individual officials are not necessarily reflective of official policy.

It would be advantageous to ensure that Armenians were massacred and looted in an orderly manner. Otherwise, some might escape death, and a significant portion of the loot might go to normal people instead of the central government or Ottoman officials. Order was a means of preventing underlings from siphoning off wealth.

The fact that food was (allegedly) provided to the concentration camps does not necessarily mean the inmates were the ones being fed. Concentration camp guards need to eat too.[citation NOT needed]

The Turks engaged in a process of purging their archives of incriminating material. As a result, what remains can be regarded as suspicious with respect to authenticity, and useless in determining the truth of the matter.[73]

As documented above, Armenian females were kept as slaves and sexually abused. Starving them would make them useless for those purposes. Unfed people obviously can't work well. In addition, nobody wants to fuck a skeleton.[citation NOT needed]

Turkish denialists claim that a manifesto written by Ovanes Kajaznuni, the first Armenian prime minister. It is widely alleged by Turkish denialists to be evidence of Armenian deceit or... something along those lines. They have not exactly been specific on what Mr Kajaznuni's manifesto allegedly proves, although they all hold it to be some sort of "smoking gun" that apparently blows the lid off of some giant Armenian conspiracy.[74] Their method of achieving this has been to forge a fake alternative translation of the manifesto in which Turkish atrocities are not mentioned.[75][note 6]

This is a moronic in content and completely irrelevant attempted red herring used by Turkish denialists as a distraction tactic in order to obscure actual events. However, unlike the others listed, not only is it technically true, but the fact of its truth has no effect on the historicity of the Armenian Genocide. It is thus complete, unadulterated bullshit and deceit.[76]
In order to deal more thoroughly with this argument, it might be useful to note participation of minorities in certain areas prior to their being subjected to genocide.

For example, here is a comparatively short and by no means exhaustive list of prominent GermanJews prior to the Holocaust:

The Turkish government and its supporters have gone to great lengths to deceive the public on the matter of the CUP genocides, especially that of the Armenians. They have forged evidence and attempted to discredit legitimate evidence as worthless, even going so far as to redefine genocide in the process. They have used numerous red herrings and distractions and inflated and conjured up imaginary bogeymen such as the "Armenian gangs", Turkish stories of whose alleged mass atrocities against Muslims amount to an Anatolian version of the blood libel, applied to their own personal hated, marginalized, and persecuted minority on whom blame must be shifted. In recent years, they have even turned to presenting the genocide as "Islamophobic", recruiting Islamic extremists to do a significant portion of their arguing for them.[77] They have made up an alternativehistory in which they have committed no genocide or colonialism, despite the fact that Turkish settlement in Anatolia is solely the product of a millennium-long colonialist policy by the Turks themselves.[78]There is no limit to the deceitfulness of Turkish revisionists.

However, defense against these tactics is fairly simple. It should be noted that none of their arguments have any real substance, and most are complete lies. When in doubt, ignore or demand sources. They will nearly always fail to provide any, or, when they do, their source will be a fringe website that can be rightly dismissed as unreliable. Meanwhile, reliable citations for the consensus position are easy to find.

Not only this, but Turkish impunity has led to the continuation of anti-Armenian sentiment within Turkey and among the Turkish community. A disturbingly large number of Turks engage in open celebration of the Armenian Genocide, calling for all remaining Armenian land to be seized and the people to be killed.[79][80] This also occurs outside Turkey, suggesting that Turkish education policies are merely part of the problem.[81] Those areas in Turkey that were not completely depopulated of Armenians in the early 20th century have been subject to a new wave of harassment, vandalism, and hate crimes.[82] People closely affiliated with the ruling Turkish government and its associated political party are threatening another genocide against what remains of Turkey's Armenian population.[83] Ethnic Kurdish separatist PKK rebels are referred to as "Armenians", in an attempt at guilt by association.[84] PKK and Turkish leftists are also alleged to be collaborating with Armenian freedom fighters.[85] The term "Armenian" is now used in Turkey as an insult.[86]

Certain bigots have accused Jews of deliberately not giving the Armenian Genocide (as well as other genocides) enough attention in the media (as they supposedly run it) in order to focus solely on the Holocaust. This conveniently overlooks the fact that unlike the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust had the benefit of the occupation of the Allies who made sure to scrupulously document, photograph, and film as much of it as they could, as well as put as many perpetrators as they could find on trial, thus creating a lot more historical material to study. But who needs things like logic when you can blame the Jews for everything?

That said, Israel (as opposed to the nebulous group of Joooz!!!11!) has been rather loath to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide and careful about not drawing parallels with the Holocaust so as not to offend Turkish officialdom, a fact eagerly snapped up by the aforementioned bigots. This has less to do with any anti-Armenianism and more to do with Turkey being pretty much the only country in the region not hostile to Israel.

As if the above wasn't enough, the infamous conservative tabloid Breitbart launched an article on the 100th anniversary of the genocide claiming that the world refused to recognize the genocide out of fear of offending Muslims.[87] The article also claims that the genocide, which was committed by the secular Young Turks, actually had been done out of Islamism. The article conveniently ignores that Syria,[88]Lebanon[89] and Iran all recognize the genocide and that Armenian Christians often live closely with the Arab Muslims in many of the countries they reside in.

Needless to say, Armenians are probably not too thrilled about either bigoted inversion listed above, as they're primarily meant to detract from focus on the genocide itself to other bigoted conspiracies.

↑ It should be noted that the version of the manifesto used and cited by the Daily beast is hosted at a Turkish denialist website and thus should be taken with a grain of salt. Other sources would likely be more useful.